This paper gathers some contributions to script and its nature identification. Different sets of features have been employed successfully for discriminating between handwritten and machine-printed Arabic and Latin scripts. They include some well established features, previously used in the literature, and new structural features which are intrinsic to Arabic and Latin scripts. The performance of such features is studied towards this paper. We also compared the performance of five classifiers: Bayes (AODEsr), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Decision Tree (J48), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) used to identify the script at word level. These classifiers have been chosen enough different to test the feature contributions. Experiments have been conducted with handwritten and machine-printed words, covering a wide range of fonts. Experimental results show the capability of the proposed features to capture differences between scripts and the effectiveness of the three classifiers. An average identification precision and recall rates of 98. 72% was achieved, using a set of 58 features and AODEsr classifier, which is slightly better than those reported in similar works.